When Tom Glavine, a star pitcher for the New York Mets, earned his milestone 300th victory on a hot and humid night in August, he had a secret weapon.

It was not illegal. It was so safe a baby could use it. In fact, many babies do.

Between innings, Glavine sipped Pedialyte, a liquid sold alongside diapers in drugstores that is meant to quickly rehydrate toddlers experiencing diarrhea. The neon-tinted fluid that comes in grape and other child-friendly flavors contains electrolytes such as sodium, potassium and glucose, which happen to be the basic ingredients in most sports drinks.

From the beverage cart on the Anaheim Ducks' team flights during the 2007 Stanley Cup playoffs to the training camps of the National Football League teams whose regular season started this weekend, Pedialyte has found its place in the kit bag of professional athletes.

Without an iota of marketing effort from Abbott Laboratories, the maker of Pedialyte, the over-the-counter remedy with a teddy bear on its label has developed a small and devoted following among professional and amateur athletes, a trend that long-distance runners seem to have started sometime in the 1980s.

Athletes are always looking for an edge, even the macho ones who would rather be seen off the field with a Cadillac Escalade than with a teddy bear. But despite that cuddly label, Pedialyte continues to pop up in locker rooms.

If there's some secret formula to victory, and, these days, if it's legal, athletes will try it.

"It'd be different if they were drinking formula," Brad Childress, the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings told The St. Paul Pioneer Press before last season about his players' pre-workout predilection for the baby elixir. "But Pedialyte is used in hospitals throughout the United States for hydration. It's different than just your regular sports drink."

While Abbott does not market Pedialyte as a sports drink or track its sales to athletes, the company is aware of its off-label use in locker rooms. Dr. Keith Wheeler, a divisional vice president for research and development at the company, says he has done enough research to know Pedialyte will work on the field.

"If you take a 300-pound NFL lineman and put him in 95 degrees with 75 percent humidity," Wheeler said, "he will dump a volume of electrolytes from his body through sweat that will be equivalent to a child with diarrhea."

As best as most observers can tell, endurance athletes were the first to consume Pedialyte as an adult sports drink in the 1980s. Compared with original Gatorade, Pedialyte has more than twice the sodium per ounce and half the carbohydrates, and it sells for more than double the price.

"Probably the ironman competitors and the ultra runners were the first ones to use the product," said Monique Ryan, a nutrition consultant and the author of "Sports Nutrition for Endurance Athletes." "People started using it when there were fewer products on the market for athletes to choose from to replace sodium."

By the late 1990s, Pedialyte had become a sports-drink rage among National Hockey League players. Other sports followed. After Korey Stringer, a 370-pound offensive tackle for the Vikings, died from complications brought on by heat stroke in 2001 during training camp, the NFL team added Pedialyte to its roster of products to help players stay properly hydrated.

Gatorade noticed.

Darren Rovell, the author of "First in Thirst: How Gatorade Turned the Science of Sweat into a Cultural Phenomenon," said the company became so concerned about the increasing use of Pedialyte and other high-sodium products in locker rooms - and the added risk that the trend could catch on with the public - that in 2005 it introduced Gatorade Endurance, a mass market drink with nearly twice as much sodium per serving as traditional Gatorade.

Endurance previously had been available only to sports teams. It is the Endurance product that runners of the New York City Marathon now receive at refreshment stations.

Mary Doherty, a spokeswoman for Gatorade, denied that Gatorade Endurance was a response to Pedialyte. "All of our innovation is a result of feedback from professional trainers across all of our college and professional team relationships," she said. "They were expressing a need for a higher sodium product."

Athletes often praise Pedialyte for possessing a sugar content lower than original Gatorade. It has 24 calories per 8 ounces, and a 24-ounce bottle costs $7.50. But whether it is better able than Gatorade or any other sports drink to add a few miles an hour to anyone's fastball is still a matter of debate.

"Pedialyte is certainly better for diarrhea than Gatorade," said Bob Murray, the director of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute in Barrington, Ill. "But for on the field, when people are hot and sweaty and want to get the most of out of their bodies, Pedialyte is going to fall short."

Murray said the main problem with Pedialyte is that it does not contain enough carbohydrates to help feed working muscles.

In a phone interview, Wheeler of Abbott Laboratories said that Gatorade had too much sucrose, "the wrong kind of carbohydrate," to effectively hydrate athletes, a statement Murray said years of his company's research proved is untrue.

The scientific debate might be impossible to settle, but Dr. Amy DeFelice, an associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of New York-Presbyterian, who regularly prescribes Pedialyte, said it is, at the least, safe for athletes as long as they have normal kidney function.

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